Temporal Cross-Cluster Communication#

When you operate multiple Temporal clusters – whether for regional deployment, compliance isolation, or blast radius reduction – workflows in one cluster eventually need to trigger work in another. This article examines three architectural approaches for cross-cluster communication, their tradeoffs, and guidance on choosing the right one for your situation.

This is an architecture guide. It establishes the concepts and patterns. The next article, Building a Worker Bridge, provides the full implementation.

Tiered-LLM Tooling: Local by Default, Escalate to Frontier#

When you build a chat or ops interface backed by an LLM, paying a frontier model for every interaction is wasteful — most interactions are cheap lookups, summaries, and routing. A tiered design serves the high-frequency majority with a small local model (e.g. an Ollama-served model on a GPU you already have) and escalates to a frontier model (e.g. Claude) only for the hard minority.